Streamline Your Billing with FreshBooks Invoice Generator for Teams

Freshbooks invoice generator for teams

hi this is tim yoder with fit small business and today i'm going to teach you how to enter track and pay your bills with the freshbooks accounting software so let's get started the first thing we'll need to do is learn how to add and manage our vendors within freshbooks so from our freshbooks dashboard we can go to our expenses tab in our left menu bar and this will open what i kind of call our vendor center and so under expenses we have bills vendors and uploads we want to click vendors and this is going to give us a list of all of our vendors so in our little sample company here we just have six vendors listed if you're going to enter a bill you need to first add the vendor so we can come up here and we can click new vendor and in the new vendor screen most of it's pretty self-explanatory so we have a company name if there is a sep if it is for a business you have a company name your contact name then at the business if it isn't a company you can just have the first and last name skip the company name account number email address website phone number street address all pretty self-explanatory over here the default currency and language we've set up for this company is us dollars in english but by clicking on that you can change those tax type we've the default is that this is not a 1099 contractor so if this is somebody that you have to issue a 1099 to at the end of the year to report all of your payments you'll want to change this tax type to yes by clicking this vendor is a contractor that way freshbooks will actually track the payments you've made when it's time to make the 10.99 at the end of the year it'll easily report it to you it's a very handy feature sales tax type so most companies will not account for sales tax that they pay separately from the expense of the service or product they'll just combine it all into one cost which is fine if for some reason you do want to track your sales tax expense separately from the cost of those underlying items then you need to change this to yes by adding a sales tax for whichever vendors you're going to pay sales tax to so when you click add a sales tax you can put in the information about the taxing authority the tax rate etc but again most companies just account for the sales tax as part of the cost of the service or item that's being purchased okay and so that's how you add a new vendor obviously you'll want to click save i'm just going to cancel out of here and again this brings us to our vendor screen and we can see a list of all the vendors that we have previously set up the next thing we need to deal with is how to enter the unpaid bills themselves in freshbooks so if we go back to our freshbook screen in our vendor section so under expenses in the left menu let's click on bills rather than vendors and then you can see a list of our recently updated bills as well as all of our bills down here so to add a new bill let's click on the big green new bill button and we can either upload a bill which would be a pdf of the bill even if we upload the pdf we still will have to fill in most of the information manually or we can just manually enter the information so we can again most of this is pretty self-explanatory click here choose a vendor from the list you've created the issue date the due date if you want to give them a bill number you can do that you can add a line description and a category would be the expense category you want to classify this bill under um good so that's pretty self-explanatory again you can so the default in this bill settings for currency and language should be whatever you set up when we just created the vendor however if you want this particular bill to be different you could adjust that here if you haven't already uploaded the bill if you would like to you could upload it at this time by selecting a file or clicking and dragging it here excellent idea to attach your bills if you're ever in an irs audit or another situation where you need to verify the accuracy of an expense very easy to do so by clicking on the expense in freshbooks and you'll have a copy of the expense attached so that's how you actually enter the unpaid bill so remember here here we haven't paid the bill yet we've only entered the bill as an unpaid bill so the next task we need to complete is to view our unpaid bills so obviously we need to view see what needs to be paid before we actually issue payments so let's flip over to our freshbooks now we're still in the bill screen where we created our bill but now we see we have two options here we have twelve hundred dollars of overdue bills and two thousand fifty dollars of total outstanding bills so these would be unpaid bills so if we click on that 2050 it's going to bring up our two individual bills that comprise that amount so we can see one to our automobile insurance company for 850 is unpaid and that is due in 12 days and we can see a bill to our accounting firm uh was due a month ago so it is overdue okay so that's how we can view our outstanding bills we can click over here just to overdue if all we're interested in viewing is our overdue bills and then that shows just the one bill that's overdue okay another way to view our unpaid bills is through an accounts payable aging report so i'm going to go over here to our left tab and click reports and down here i'm going to click on our accounts payable aging and there again is our two thousand fifty dollars worth of outstanding bills but this is classified in an aging table so we have a different column um based on how long the accounts payable is overdue so here we have shows our accounting firm that bill is between 31 and 60 days overdue whereas our automobile insurance bill that's actually not overdue yet is simply outstanding so this is very helpful when you're short on cash you have a lot of outstanding bills this can classify them to show you exactly which ones are the most outstanding so you can perhaps prioritize payments of those so hopefully you don't get in that situation but obviously sometimes cash flow isn't what you want it to be accounts payable aging report is very useful in in deciding which bills to pay so the next item i need to show you is how to actually record the payment of the bill and freshbooks so again let's flip over to our freshbook screen and let's go back to our dashboard so click the back over here with reports dashboard okay so let's go to our expenses and we're going to want to view our bills so click on bills now find the bill however you would like if you scroll down a little bit you can get a list of all all bills you can sort them by vendor then since you're wanting to pay a particular bill you probably know which vendor you want to pay so you can easily do that so let's find the bill we want to pay let's say we want to pay our accounting firm so let's click on that bill and up here under more actions we can say add a payment okay and so it brings up the twelve hundred dollars let's say we're just going to pay it with a check and today and we'll hit add payment okay now if we scroll down below the bill it's going to show us that we made a payment on this bill of twelve hundred dollars now notice if we'd wanted to short pay it meaning we don't pay the full amount say we only wanted to pay a thousand dollars we certainly could have done that right and that field that that opened up when we added the payment we could have set a thousand instead of 1200 so that is a nice feature of freshbooks um you can short pay your bills and so there we go we we recorded the payment of the bill from our accounting firm so if we flip back now to our bills page you can now see we don't have anything overdue because we paid the one bill we had overdue if you look down here the accounting firm bill now shows as being paid so we've recorded the payment on that bill the next thing i'd like to show you is how to edit the bills once you've entered them in freshbooks so let's go ahead and click back to our freshbook screen and we're in our bills screen and so we can see all of the bills if you want to edit a bill you can go in here find the bill let's edit this unpaid bill of 850 dollars if we just click anywhere in here it's going to open the bill now we can't edit it directly from here we're going to have to hit the edit button and now it's pulled up the same screen as when we originally entered it so we can edit any of this information that we like okay and that's it that's paying your bills with freshbooks i hope you found this useful this was one of five tutorials we have on freshbooks from fit small business i'll provide a link in the description below that'll take you to the home page for all five of those free fresh books tutorials and again my name was tim yoder with fit small business and i hope you found this useful